Gov2.0 Summit, Day 2

It's the last day of the Gov2.0 Summit, and I'm back for another stretch of liveblogging. Today, we'll hear from Carl Malamud, Vivek Kundra and Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation early on. I'm expecting another fascinating day of talks.

As before, I'll be liveblogging below and cross-posting to Twitter. Feel free to leave comments any time.

Open government pioneer Carl Malamud draws on his own experience changing the way numerous government agencies--including the SEC, Patent Office, Smithsonian, and our federal courts--publish their information on the Internet. He puts the changes we are witnessing today into perspective, drawing on 200 years of American history and showing why access to the working of government by private citizens is crucial for our economy and for our democracy.

Opening data is "an opportunity for citizens to make government more efficient."

Three propositions that should be true in a free society:

"If a document is to have the force of law, it should be free for all to read."

"If a meeting is part of the law-making process is truly public, that means it must be on the internet." "If you want to attend a hearing today, you best live in the beltway, and you'd better hire someone to guard your place in line." "Shielding hearings from the public eye reduces the credibility of Congress."

"The principal that primary legal material should be available to all is a principal that should be led by the executive branch and should apply to all levels."

Moderated by Ellen Miller, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation. What is the state of data.gov and other government transparency initiatives? Open data is one of the foundations of the digital commonwealth. It fosters re-use and innovation, and also helps citizens hold government accountable. But it also raises privacy and security issues. What data should be made available? How are innovators making it more useful? What policy issues need to be addressed? What can government learn from Web 2.0 and cutting edge technology companies about how the data-driven organization works, and what it makes possible? Ellen and Vivek will tackle these issues and more in a conversation on the key issues of the Summit.

USASpending.gov was built on top of Sunlight's FedSpending.org, though at significantly higher cost. But cost aside, how do we get data that's more timely and more accurate?

Kundra: "The infrastructure that a lot of these agencies run on ... a lot of those agencies have aging systems. They're built on COBOL infrastructure. They're built on systems that can't handle the demand."

Second, he says, we need to change the culture of data in DC. People want to go through more layers of trying to clean up information before releasing it.

Kundra said is faster to release the data quickly and let the public find gaps. "Within 30 days...we noticed the quality of data was going up."

Data.gov is "one of your signature accomplishments, and a great one," Miller tells Kundra.

But, "you picked the low hanging fruit. You put it online and nobody got hurt and it looks terrific."

What's the plan to expand it and "get into the meat of data?"

Kundra: "Data.gov is the first brick when you think of open data and government." It's the first step to being a platform.

The government needs to shift from technology and move debates toward public policy. If you bought a camera, you could compare megapixels and cost and quality. But you can't do that with health care, or energy. "How do you compare and effectively make public policy decisions that are data driven?"

Government is not the only source of good ideas, says Kundra.

"How do we get people to give us better ideas?"

"We always knew that the most interesting ideas were at the intersection of multiple data feeds," Kundra says, so it's no surprise, he adds, that DataMasher won Apps for America.

"We need to find gamechanging strategies to solve these problems." Kundra says the government is looking at cloud computing solutions to save money.

Here's another example: When TSA wanted to launch a blog, the initial cost was estimated at $6 million. But "wiser heads prevailed," Kundra said, and "we realized we could host it free online." Here's the blog, running on Blogger.

What might be happening that could clarify things or make complexity knee bending and overwhelming for government agencies? In a discussion we call Clouds Over Washington: The Cloud And How It Can Serve Government, we explore how the move to cloud computing might provide significant benefit to openness, transparency, and easier collaboration-or result in significant problems.

Casey Coleman, the CIO of the GSA, says this is about fundamentally changing the way government operates. Procurement and security are complex and expensive. "Our goal is to abstract some of those issues away."

The key to the cloud is "only paying for the resources you really use."

So, what kinds of data can the government put in the cloud? And more importantly, O'Reilly asks, will agencies share resources?

Coleman: We really have many small customers in the government, not one large one. "One of the advantages of cloud computing is that you can start small."

O'Reilly: Can the government do rapid development? "How much room is there for that kind of experimentation?"

Coleman: "Right now, there is not a culture in rapid development, in rapid release cycles." The friction comes from "the time to complete the procurement, the time to complete the security and requirements processes."

Coleman: That's probably Interior's business operations center, which is fee-for-service.

Part of the thing about cloud computing is that the lines between systems get blurred. It's important to think about needs, and maybe Interior can provide for some needs.

Vogel: It's possible the cloud can provide more security than you can provide yourself. "Keeping your data secure is a very specialized task." Think about HIPAA. The overall process needs to be secure, not just the infrastructure.

Startups aren’t just for the garage anymore. A new kind of entrepreneur is emerging from startup hubs worldwide. They are mastering not just new technologies but the discipline to create value for real people. The lean startup is a look at this new trend and ways it can be applied by organizations large and small.

We're getting into practical issues now with Elliott Fisher (The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice):

In this session we examine some of the possibilities that access to data might have for Health2.0. How might we use data as a platform to improve health care and reduce costs? Dr. Elliott Fisher is Principal Investigator of the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. He is also Professor of Medicine and Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School and Director of the Center for Health Policy Research in the newly established Dartmouth Institute for Health Care Policy and Clinical Practice. His work with the Dartmouth Atlas was cited in a New Yorker magazine article and used by President Obama as a reference in his health care plan.

In Miami, for example, people see physicians almost three times as often as those in Salem, OR, which has a far lower cost of care.

Part of the underlying problem, Fisher says, is a failure to recognize the role of local health care systems as drivers of cost. Lack of support for improvement, care management and coordination. Also, the public equates more with better. Finally, the present payment system rewards more care, not better care.

Staying on health care, next is Carleen Hawn of HealthSpottr, highlighting things that work in the current system.

First example: a physician prescribes antibiotics for a throat infection. Each day the patient gets an email asking how they feel, with links to better, same, worse or resolved. The doctor sees a matrix of patients and can quickly tell what's working for whom.

Shifting slightly, H1N1 is back in the news. How do we use data to deal with it? How can citizens help?

In this session we’ll examine how modern networks permit us to harness information flow to provide early warning and vastly improve our response to system-stressing events such as the H1N1 pandemic. Technologies available now offer governments and engaged citizens much better pandemic surveillance, situational awareness, and decision-making across all levels of response and can provide for much greater resilience. Jim Stogdill of Accenture serves as our moderator; he will be joined by two world class leaders in medicine, collaboration, resilience, and information technology: Michael McDonald, MD; President, Global Health Initiatives, Inc., and Eric Rasmussen, MD; CEO, INSTEDD, a .org begun with initial funding from Google to look for early signs of disease detection through innovative approaches to technology and collaboration.

Resilience in the health system is built on horizontal communication, meaning people share information with each other, not just with a central hub. There isn't much sharing vertically within health systems.